This seemed like a great opportunity to learn about the inner workings of the tor
network and flex my kubernetes muscles. Here are some of the tricky bits I
encountered for anyone trying to do something similar.

Testing mode

To get a chance of running our own tor network we must enable
TestingTorNetwork, this tweaks a number of settings, such as not totally
banning private IPs and reducing delays in voting.

Directory Authorities

A fundamental part of a tor network is the Directory Authority. When connecting
to the network the client will connect to one of these to find out a list of
relays to further connect to. These are hardcoded in to the tor source
code*.

Fortunately there are config options we can use to override these values
(DirAuthority). This config needs to have not just the address but the
fingerprint of the authority (so we know we can trust it).

So from initial research it sounded like all we need to do was:

Generate certificates and signatures for 3 directory authorities

Create directory authorities (configured with their certificates)

Configure 10 relays to talk to directory authorities

Create 10 relays

ConfigMaps and directories

When trying to get the directory authorities running I had issues poking the
certificates in. tor is kind of specific about the structure it expects (an id
and keys dir). Because ConfigMaps don't do subdirectories (ref)
I ended up using a flat structure in the ConfigMap and using my docker-entrypoint.sh
to set up symlinks to achieve the desired structure.

DirtAuthority address

For the DirAuthority line we're expected to use an IP address
(mailing list discussion).
From a kubernetes point of view this is a bit annoying. Using a Service we can
easily know the hostname upfront but an IP is more tricky. We could set the
ClusterIP but that leaves config bound to a particular cluster setup.

The solution is not so bad - when we generate each DirAuthority line we just
make sure we've already created the Services and use their IP addresses. We can
use jsonpath to get the IP:

kubectl get svc da1 -o 'jsonpath={.spec.clusterIP}'

Works, but it makes our setup a bit less elegant - we have to generate config
files based upon the state of the kubernetes cluster.

Relay address

On start, if not provided with one, tor will search for an IP address to use. As
we don't know our pod IP up front, this sounds ideal. Unfortunately, tor will
not pick a private IP address
(ref)
unless explicitly given that address.

This means we have to have add another trick - a docker-entrypoint.sh to append
an Address line to our torrc with the pod's IP . Again, not awful, but not
pretty.

Running it

With all these pieces in place I was able to successfully run a private tor
network. I can route internet traffic through it (and see it hopping between
servers) and scale the number of relays up and down.

Conclusion

I'm reasonably happy with my final product, it produces a fully
operational tor network. There is a certain amount of bash scaffolding which
I'm not a huge fan of. It might be interesting to try and do this project again
but as an Operator.

** I'm lying here to keep things simple. There are also Fallback mirrors that tor
will connect to first. These are also hardcoded in to the tor source
code.

Other articles

I've just published an iOS app on the app store, I developed it (mostly) using
Linux (Ubuntu). Here I have documented some of the challenges and discoveries
for anyone considering doing the same.

Before anyone gets too exicted, this is a
Cordova app. That means it basically a web app
(HTML, CSS, Javascript) served in a web view. There's no Swift or Objective-C
here (at least, not written by me). Furthermore, my total solution uses two
hosted Mac OS offerings. The day to day development still sticks to Linux, but
I didn't find a solution that doesn't touch Mac.

This post won't go in to much detail about the limitations of a cordova app over
a "native" app, as these are already documented elsewhere. I will
say that you can produce a decent looking, responsive, completely offline
application that Apple will accept on their app store using this mechanism.

Linux and iOS Development

Apple are not exactly known for making development for their platforms easy
on operating systems that aren't Mac OS. If you look in to this you will find
people on the internet advising that even developing a basic Cordova app would
be made a lot easier by buying a mac.

But I'm a Linux user, so I'm not necessarily that interested in making my life
easy.

When I started out my main concerns were:

Testing my app locally in an emulator.

Building a release to to test on an iPhone.

Running my app on an iPhone.

Remotely debugging my app on an iPhone.

Building an app store ready release.

Uploading my release to the app store.

It turned out these were all things to be worried about (some solveable, some
not), I'd missed one:

Producing screenshots for the app store.

Development Environment

Before we address each of these points I'll give you a quick overview of my
setup. I went for the classic gulp/bower/npm/etc. combo. I used the AngularJS
framework.

I used a generator to get
started. I ultimately regret this, it got me going quickly but left huge gaps in
my knowledge. Next time I would use such a project as a reference, but hand
pick the pieces I wanted.

This generator gave me some .html and .js I could edit, some commands I could
run to serve them to my web browser from a local web server.

With this and Chrome Device Mode
I was able to develop a web page and look at what it might look like on an iPhone.

Whilst that's OK, Chrome is not the web view that Cordova runs on the iPhone, so
we don't really have any guarantees that the app will look as we see it on our
computer. That brings us to the first concern.

Testing my app locally in an emulator

It's quite simple - if you don't run Mac OS you can't run an iPhone emulator.
There are browser plugins (and the previously mentioend device mode) that will
make a browser sort of look like a phone, but that's your lot.

Personally I found that for 95% of cases Chrome was similar enough. The other 5%
we'll get to later.

(See "Producing screenshots" if you really want to run an emulator).

Building a release to to test on an iPhone

Again, this I couldn't achieve purely on Linux. This brings us to my first cheat.

Adobe Phonegap is a commercial service based upon
Cordova. If you create a (free) account with them they will build iPhone
binaries for you (for free).

There's one more hoop before that will work - certificiates. The iPhone
won't accept a binary which isn't signed by a certificate from Apple. And the
only way to get your hands on one of these is to give money to Apple.

Once you sign up and pay for an Apple Developer account you will get some
development certificates. You plug these in to phonegap, along with your
project's git repo, and a .ipa file is produced.

Running my app on an iPhone

Here comes our first pleasant surprise - I can take my phonegap built .ipa and
install it on to my iPhone straight from Linux using
ideviceinstaller. It's
this simple:

And that's it - I get my app running on my phone exactly as it will be when I
sell it. It pops up on the home screen and I can launch, easy.

Remotely debugging my app on an iPhone

As anyone who's written code for a browser will know - browser quirks can be the
most infuriating issues to code for and around. This is the 5% of problems I
mentioend previously.

Whether it's CSS or Javascript - being able to open the debug console and tweak
things is incredinly useful. As you may have already figured out, the cycle of -
commit to git, push to git, build binary on third party service (phonegap),
download binary, install binary to phone, launch binary - is not exactly a quick
feeback loop.

This brings us to our second pleasant discovery. We can use the
ios_webkit_debug_proxy in
conjunction with our running app. This allows us to use Chrome devtools on our
computer, attached to the Safari webview running in our app on the phone. This
makes debugging all manor of browser specific problems a lot easier.

It's that easy - then through Chrome I can twiddle CSS and run Javascript in my
app.

Building an app store ready release

This is the same as how we build our .ipa for testing, the only difference is we
have to use some different certificates from Apple. The process is otherwise
identical - and phonegap will pop out a production ready .ipa.

Uploading my release to the app store

This was a bit of a shock. Naturally on a mac this process integrates in to
XCode and those lucky developers can upload to the app store (iTunes Connect) at
the push of a button.

I had assumed there would be some web interface (as there is to configure all
other pieces of the app) to allow for submission of our binary. This is not the
case.

Your two options are:

XCode

Application Loader

Both of these are native Mac OS tools. This brings us to our second cheat.
Unfortunately phonegap aren't kind enough to offer this service for us, but
there's another option: MacinCloud. For a fee ($1
an hour) you can access a full blown Mac OS instance with Application Loader
available (accessible via rdesktop).

Using this service, it's possible to upload the .ipa to the app store for public
release.

(In searching for solutions to this I also found various
random-people-on-the-internet who in exchange for some cash and all your Apple
login details would submit your app for you from their mac. I did not go down
this fairly sketchy route).

Producing screenshots for the app store

We're not quite finished yet! Chances are you want to upload some screenshots
of your application. iTunes Connect has a thing called Media Manager which will
helpfully take screenshots of the highest iPhone resoltuion and scale them down
for you. At time of writing this is 2208x1242 pixels. That is unfortunately more
pixels than I have on my laptop.

There's no verification of the images you upload (from what I can see), so you
could fake these in any way you like, but if you want to produce a bunch of
screenshots of your actual app you may end up doing what I did - uploading your
code to Macincloud, running it in Xcode and using the iPhone 7 emulator +
screenshot functionality.

Conclusion

Whilst there were a few hoops to jump through in this process, the whole ordeal
was not that painful. Throughout the project I was prepared to just go and get a
mac but I was keen to avoid this if I could.

The main times I found myself truly swearing at my computer were when I was
trying to set up plugins - for which
(when I got things wrong) the feedback loop was infuriatingly slow.

All in all I think it was fine to do it this way and I'm glad that to maintain
my iOS project I can use my regular development environment. Admittedly, a great
deal of the ease comes from the fact that this is a web app - which should be
easy to develop on any platform.

Updated 2017/01/03: Modified setup to use Xen instead of Qemu for master+nodes,
upgrade Kubernetes to 1.5.1, use CoreOS beta instead of alpha.

This is a description of my local kubernetes setup. If you want to set up
kubernetes yourself chances are you should follow the
proper guide. This
is intended to be the reference that I was desparate for when I set out doing
this a few months ago.

I wanted to run my own kubernetes deployment to run applications and experiment.
I didn't just want to try out kubernetes, I wanted to run it 24/7.
From the looks of it the easiest way to do this is using Google Compute Engine
or AWS. The problem
with both of these is to run 24/7 you end up spending quite a lot of money every
month just to keep a basic install running.

After considering a bunch of options (including running a Raspberry Pi Cluster)
I came to the conclusion that my best setup would be to run a single physical
server that hosted bunch of virtual machines.

I picked Xen as my hypervisor, Ubuntu
as my "dom0" (more on this later) and CoreOS as my
kubernetes host. Here's my set up.

Hardware

Dell T20 Server

Intel i5-4590

16 GB RAM

120 GB SSD

Software

Hypervisor: Xen Hypervisor / Ubuntu 16.04. I found myself thoroughly
confused by all this talk of "dom0" but the gist of this is: You install Ubuntu
16.04 on your server, you then install (via apt-get) Xen which installs itself
as the main OS with your original Ubuntu install as a virtual machine. This
virtual machine is called "dom0" and is what you use to manage all your other
virtual machines.

(Another source of confusion - Xen is not XenServer, which is a commercial product
you can safely ignore).

Kubernetes OS: CoreOS Alpha Channel. Right now Stable does not include the kubelet
(which we need) so I'm using Alpha. This is what I picked as it tries to support Kubernetes
right out of the box.

Installing Xen

On a fresh Ubuntu 16.04, install Xen, libvirt and virtinst. Replace it as the
deafult boot point and restart. virtinst gives us a CLI we will use to launch
virtual machines later. genisoimage we need for mkisofs.

What comes back up should be the original Ubuntu install running as a virtual
machine on the Xen hypervisor. Because it's the original install we don't know
for sure that anything actually changed. We can check with xl:

Installing Kubernetes

Kubernetes comes with these nifty scripts that basically set up your
whole cluster for you. The problem I found with this is I wanted to manage (and
understand) the pieces of software myself. I didn't want a mysterious bash
script that promised to take care of it all for me.

Instead I've created my own set of mysterious scripts, that are slightly less
generated and templated that may be useful to some as examples. This is how to
use them.

We're going to use as little as possible of my stuff - the following git repo is
4 CoreOS cloud-config
files. These define basic configuration (network setup, applications to run).
There's also a piece of config to generate our SSL certificate for the cluster.

Conclusion

So what have we actually done? We've turned an Ubuntu server in to a Xen Hypervisor.
On that hypervisor we've created 4 virtual machines all running CoreOS. From the
CoreOS config from my git repo we've set up 1 CoreOS install running the
master kubernetes components, 3 others are running the node components.

There's many ways we can get Kubernetes running on CoreOS. The particular way we
have set it up as is follows.

flannel service - This handles our networking. It allows a container
on one node to speak to a container on another node.

etcd service - This is where kubernetes persists state.

docker service - Docker is how this kubernetes setup launches images.

kubelet service - This is the only kubernetes component installed as a system
service. We use the kubelet to join our kubernetes cluster and launch other
kubernetes applications.

As well as system services we've also installed the following as services
managed by kubernetes, we do this by placing kubernetes config in
/etc/kubernetes/manifests/. The kubelet service monitors this directory and
launches applications based on what it finds.

kube-apiserver

kube-scheduler

kube-controller-manager

kube-proxy

That's all! We've not got a fully functioning kubernetes cluster. Time to play
with it.